87% of Germany's 148,000 Arrest Warrant Suspects Are Not German Citizens
October 10, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
German federal data show 87 percent of the 148,000 people currently wanted on arrest warrants do not hold a German passport. The figures were not published proactively; parliament extracted them through a formal inquiry.
87 percent of the 148,000 people currently wanted on outstanding arrest warrants in Germany are not German nationals, according to figures the Federal Ministry of the Interior provided in response to a parliamentary inquiry. The data was provided to Welt newspaper in response to that inquiry.
The disproportion is stark. German citizens make up 81 percent of Germany's population but account for just 11.2 percent of warrant suspects, or 16,671 people. Romanian nationals follow immediately behind with 16,123 open warrants, then Polish nationals with 12,721, Georgian nationals with 6,869, and Turkish nationals with 6,696.
The inquiry was filed by AfD lawmaker Sebastian Münzenmaier. He told Welt am Sonntag: "The figures speak for themselves: The overwhelming majority of criminals wanted on arrest warrants do not have a German passport." He called for permanent border controls, the immediate removal of foreign criminals, and the enforcement of remaining sentences in offenders' countries of origin.
Alexander Throm, domestic-policy spokesman for the CDU parliamentary group, said: "Every open arrest warrant poses a security risk." He pointed to a concrete result: border controls introduced in September 2024 have apprehended more than 17,500 people carrying outstanding warrants at German entry points. "They have not only curbed illegal migration," Throm said.
Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the German Police Union, called the overall total worrying and said it "of course, represents a security policy problem." State police forces, he told the paper, rarely have the staffing for dedicated searches; most arrests happen as a "chance hit or bycatch." Personnel shortages, the union has long argued, are a central obstacle to public safety.
Sebastian Fiedler, the Social Democratic Party's domestic-policy spokesman in the Bundestag, urged caution about reading the figure as 148,000 dangerous offenders at large. He said a significant portion consists of substitute prison sentences for unpaid fines, citing North Rhine-Westphalia, where more than half of all open warrants fell into that category. Warrants can also remain active against people who have already left Germany or been deported, to be enforced if they return.
Those caveats carry weight with researchers. Susann Prätor, a professor at the police academy in Lower Saxony, told Deutsche Welle that comparing raw suspect figures is "often like comparing apples to oranges." Non-Germans are, on average, younger than Germans, she noted, and young men are the demographic most likely to appear in crime statistics in any country. A 2024 study by the Criminological Institute of Lower Saxony found that non-Germans were reported to police nearly three times as often as Germans, which Prätor says inflates their share of official figures.
What the caveats cannot explain away is the scale. Foreign nationals represent roughly 15 percent of Germany's population, according to federal data reported by Political.org, yet they account for close to half of all identified violent crime suspects. Violent crime in Germany has risen to its highest level in over 15 years. In Berlin alone, approximately 7,000 warrants remain unserved while the city's prisons run at 81 percent capacity, according to Mittelrhein-Tageblatt.
The figures were released in response to a parliamentary inquiry.
Published October 10, 2026 · Frisian News